Gilles, chapter II
Best known in the English speaking world for his book Le Feu Follet, which has been adopted into several films, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle considered the semi-autobiographical Gilles to be his greatest work. The literary critic Gaëtan Picon wrote that Gilles “is, without any doubt, one of the greatest novels of the century—and one of those books in which the disarming sincerity of a man rises to the grandeur usually reserved to literary transpositions.”
Gilles, chapter II
When Gilles woke, he was surprised not to feel cold. He was no longer at the front, he was in Paris. Alas! the spell of Paris had been broken; his mouth was bitter and he was in a cursed place.
A body was next to his, he sensed an indifferent presence, horribly indifferent. He was in a cursed place and a damned woman was beside him. She slept like a dead woman, a dead woman who believes in nothingness; she ignored him, like a stone ignores another stone. He was nothing but a soldier, a brute, who had gone to throw himself drunkenly against nothingness. The whole night seemed like a silly, perfunctory joke. The room was dark, but he knew it was daylight from the noises he heard. The woman stunk of cheap perfume, sweat and cooled tobacco. The smell in Gilles’ nose was as horrible as the taste in his mouth.
Yet he’d found her beautiful. He liked such raw beauty; he couldn’t complain: she was more beautiful to him than the fat belle and the other one and the lady caught in bed. So he was happy about that, but he had a taste in his mouth, and suddenly wished he were somewhere else, in a bed where he could have been alone and slept for twelve hours. And then he’d have a bath. And then…
What was to become of him? Where would he go? Where would he find money? After paying for this woman and the room, what would he have left? He didn’t have a family, and he didn’t regret not having one. These were not things for him. His tutor, on a propaganda mission in Canada, was a loner himself. If he wrote to his home in Normandy, the maid would have little to send back. His tutor had a notary in Paris… but no, Gilles wanted to leave himself to chance. To the delicious chance of encounters. It wasn’t a question of tenderness, but of desire. Desire and lust were in him. For everything. And for nothing. Money had to be found. The only way was to ask those who had it. This was a definite necessity, not at all humiliating. After so many shells and crawling in the mud, what could humiliate him? He thought back to the Falkenbergs; he’d thought of them on the train. They were the only rich people he could reach. Their sons had been killed in his regiment. They could refuse him nothing. He was sure that money was at hand. Why did he need money? To eat, to drink, to sleep, to wash, to stir, to rest. And especially for women. He wanted women he could pay. Lost women for a lost man, girls for a soldier.
It was time to get up and go to the Falkenbergs. He washed and dressed.
“Are you leaving, darling?”
With a whore’s reflex, the woman half-emerged from sleep for a second. Her hand took the money. Outside, he was free to go in any direction.
He was a little intimidated when he went up to the Falkenberg house. He didn’t take the elevator, he wanted to savor the calm of the staircase—another beautiful staircase, there are many beautiful staircases in life—and above all his furtive willingness, his light embarrassment, his heavy confidence.
A tender, happy emotion seized him: he remembered that the Falkenbergs had daughters. He’d dreamt about it on the train, and it was coming back. He had prepared a phrase for the servant. It was a chambermaid who opened the door and shuddered when she saw the number on his hat. Then she flinched, looking up into his face.
“I’d like to see Madame Falkenberg.”
The chambermaid bent under the weight of the words she had to say.
“Monsieur doesn’t know. The Madame, monsieur, is dead. She died soon after her two sons.”
So this is what happens within the mansions of Paris. He no longer felt in the same city as the evening before.
“Oh.”
He forgot the money and was ready to leave.
“But monsieur could see the Mademoiselle.”
Something trivial and energetic returned to him.
He was so reassured that he said no. To play.
“No, I don’t want to disturb… I’ll come back.”
“No, you won’t. I see monsieur was in these gentlemen’s regiment. Mademoiselle would not want to miss… Who shall I say is calling?”
“Monsieur Gilles Gambier.”
“Ah! yes, sir…”
He had been talked about and was known around the house.
He was ushered into a library. Noble, comfortable, warm and sad. At the foot of an armchair, a chancellor was baying. He thought of the father, Mr Falkenberg, one of Paris’s leading businessmen. Suddenly, he realized he was staying with Jews. He’d never known Jews before the Falkenberg sons. Gilles devoured everything with his eyes and was immediately seized by the urge to read. He had read for a long time, madly, he had not even stopped reading in the trenches, in the hospitals, in the mud, in the cold, among the bellowing of the herd, the turning over of nature by the shells. He thought back to the second-line trench where the day before yesterday he’d been reading Pascal. It’s good to read, an immense quiet pleasure, the great abolition of sorrow. Books are all over the place; what harmony, what peace.
The door opened. Gilles tensed in a sudden violence of hope, of desire, of chance. Gilles was delighted.
A face came towards him. A luminous face. Everything seemed vast, because light reigned there. Big eyes, an open forehead, prolonged by hair of dazzling black. Contrasting with all this was a thick, dark mouth, like a childish allusion to voluptuousness. It was only after a moment that Gilles perceived that beneath this face there was a body, a frail body, with a delicate bust and slender legs.
From one second to the next, the light of life changed. He who was a man at the front, deprived of everything since forever, a man of solitude, indifference, escape, he who had only come there to seize a light ticket and return to his reverie or his wedding, he was seized, frozen. Frozen by desire. What illuminated her was intelligence, and her money.
A realization entered him at once and violated his character: that all this could be his.
She came forward, she was thin, upset and tense. In vain a clumsy, naive smile, completely uncontrolled, tried disturb the light in her face: it failed. The voice was too high, but well delivered. With the French words, the exoticism of her face became tenderly familiar.
“Bonjour, monsieur.”
Gilles then realized that there had been something painful about that face the moment it had appeared in the crack in the window, something that appeared as soon as her luminous eyes had fixed themselves on his uniform, on the number on his collar.
She was badly dressed. She wore a grief worse than his. And what’s more this austerity disturbed Gilles, because it was no match for her fresh skin, so absolutely pure. This skin made a prodigious contrast, without him even thinking about it, with the dirty skin of his last hooker.
“Jacques and Daniel talked to me about you, especially Daniel.”
She didn’t cry; her face hardened.
Suddenly Gilles heard his voice, his own voice burst out:
“I didn’t come to talk to you about them, I came to ask you for money.”
He stopped and was surprised, but by no means frightened. He had a taste for disaster and immediately accepted the idea of breaking with this unplanned fate and fleeing alone into the void, the delicious nothingness of the streets and anonymous places. The brothel is the very heart of anonymity.
In a feline afterthought, he also told himself that he had just struck a master stroke.
Indeed, this young girl was not surprised. Her luminous face opened to his advantage.
“Oh! Yes, of course.”
She thought it natural and didn’t stop to think about it. She looked at him with immense interest.
He no longer thought about money, but about the soul expressed by that luminous face.
She turned towards him and gave herself to him that very second, without the slightest reservation, with a frightening ingenuity. Within this ravaged flat, there was such panicked abandonment, to the point of death, in her voice, first high, then deeper, a little guttural, that Gilles realised that he was suddenly the master of a soul and a great fortune. He would undoubtedly marry this girl. He was a married man. He thought back to his anguish the previous evening over his hundred francs. For, now, it seemed to him that there had been anguish over his hundred francs, despite his boastful adventurism.
But then he heard his voice, his own voice again working of its own accord.
“Have you got a sister?”
If she had said yes, a craving for the unknown would have rebounded inside him. But she said no, and he found himself much richer. An only child.
They talked about the two slain brothers, and he saw in her expression, with an extraordinary amusement resounding through all the cynical fibres of his being, that she was burying them with him a second time. They were burying his brothers; they spoke of it almost immediately with too much finesse, with detachment. There was already a complicity between them. However, this complicity did not go beyond a certain limit. Was it her innocence? Was it the cold reflection in Gilles’ eyes that stopped her without her knowing it? The young girl didn’t seem to know how much her mouth quivered.
“I’m alone, with my father… Yes, I work, I’m a biologist.”
Gilles shuddered. The austere word contrasted even more sharply with the grey dress, the beautiful teeth and the crimson mouth. Suddenly, he wanted to bite the word biology out of that mouth.
He thought back to the brothel and was frightened; he was dirty, he saw a chasm between him and her. Perhaps that night he had caught the pox, another fatality of the soldier. Suddenly, he thought of leaving. He got up very suddenly.
Like a frightened child, his face twitching, and he stammered:
“You will allow me to come back and see you.”
“Yes, of course. I’m here a lot: I work, I don’t like to go out.”
He shook her hand and left. She remained disconcerted, delighted and torn.
Gilles found himself in the street, with no money. He railed a little against the prodigious carelessness of rich people, but he also had to rail against his own. Carefree? No, enchanted. Thank God something had happened to make him forget about the money. Going back up the stairs? After such a happy and decisive step, he should rest. The money would come sooner or later through the most noble of dealings with this delicate person; the money would come with happiness. In the meantime, happiness was already there.
He walked towards the Avenue du Bois. He was light and full of the finest enthusiasm. He was bathing in the purity of this girl. No more sensual heaviness.
In the main avenue, he saw beautiful proud young girls promenading. The first sensation he had felt when she had entered the library fell back on him, more violent, crushing. He was overwhelmed by the urgency of the conquest. He who, two days earlier, had been dozing on the damp straw of a barn, free of all worry and effort, was now taken to another world. A terrible, painful rapture. Mr Falkenberg’s beautiful books, his daughter’s gleaming teeth, her fragile hands, the haughty calm of the big flat, the money in the banks, all this violated the holy indifference of his heart. He would have to take it all in; the inconvenience was painful and unbearable. He was already terrified of having left the girl. All his nerves vibrated at the idea that by leaving her he had perhaps lost her, that she was going to escape him. She was going to be taken away, she was already gone. She belonged to a world that wasn’t for him. Everything would return to normal. All he could see was cruelty, threats and inexorable condemnation. He shuddered and tears welled up in his eyes, and he felt pity for himself as he had at the front in the early days. Everything he saw contributed in turn to deepening his wound and erasing her. For a second, he was charmed by a passer-by, and that was a promise of happiness. Then, again, the idea of happiness was overwhelming. The light and the cold were annoying. The Avenue du Bois, far from the war, wide enough for the mass of its black branches to remain low under a great calm sky, opened its short perspective. Before the war, he had sometimes walked there, refusing with passionate dread to fall into a trap he would return to. After so many gusts of wind, he once again lingered to consider the world of the rich: women, children, dogs, horses, trees, and the common people who are attached to the world of the rich, sweepers, town sergeants. Gilles was not insensitive to the presence of the poor, but he voluptuously accorded supremacy to the rich. Peace merged with wealth. Many things were enigmatically entangled with wealth: above all, sweet and lofty wisdom that marked itself on the golden letters of Mr Falkenberg’s preciously bound books. The gold of the titles kept coming back before his eyes. It was the same substance that made exquisite the pelt on a young woman’s neck. For the rich were young women and those tall, luxurious trees, so well cared for, rounding their domes in domestic tranquillity. What a contrast with the trees of Verdun. Injustice was everywhere, sovereign and serene.
Gilles forgot his anguish for a moment; he was caught up in the rhythm of the comings and goings of the walkers, in the network of their glances, gestures and smiles. He was standing very straight and he wanted to believe that he was not lacking in any elegance.
Anguish returned. All this, even if he held it, would never be his. He would always be a stranger in a world that had done quite well without him for all eternity. But her, she wasn’t like the people on this avenue. She showed the awkwardness that comes from intelligence, and because of that she could sympathise with him, understand him, support him.
“You could say hello, young man!”
Someone grabbed him by the sleeve. Gilles gasped. By military reflex, his hand went to his kepi as he turned round.
“Ah! Doctor…”
It was Doctor Vaudemont, an old friend of his tutor, who was pulling him out of his reverie by the sleeve.
“Am I disturbing you?” taunted the white voice again.
Under the old kepi with its four tarnished stripes, Gilles recognised the austere, ironic and passionate face. The surgeon looked at him with the bitter mouth and tender eyes he remembered well.
“Well, my boy, were you a long time at the front?”
“Yes,” replied Gilles, with a sudden shiver.
“And no problems?”
“Oh, no, no. Well…”
Gilles pointed absent-mindedly at his left arm.
The surgeon asked him about his tutor.
“How is old Carentan doing?”
“He’s in Canada on a propaganda mission.”
“Carentan, on a propaganda mission!”
The surgeon smiled sarcastically. And Gilles recalled two or three conversations between the two men before the war that had struck him deeply. The two men had known each other all their lives and held each other in the highest esteem. They discussed divine matters. The surgeon, a practising Catholic, seemed the most sceptical mind in the world. He spoke of science with a grumpy irritation, as if it were a delicate and absurd thing, which did as much harm as good, and he closed himself angrily to the occultist speculations of Gildas Carentan who, in his attic full of books, evoked in a subtle and mysterious concert all the gods around God. When the surgeon went away, Gilles was astonished to hear Gildas Carentan say of this caustic man:
“He has an exquisite heart.”
The surgeon was unhappy in his marriage. He earned a lot of money, which his wife and children took from him for their luxuries. At the hospital, his disciples and patients worshipped with fear and pity this prodigious architect of healing, who seemed to doubt the good he was doing and to find no relief from his dryness. Carentan added:
“He goes to mass very early every morning. That’s probably where his heart is dying.”
The surgeon, however, felt Gilles’ arm, so thin, his hand dead.
“Carentan, as a propagandist. This war persecutes the mind as well as the heart. I don’t see what he can say to the Canadians.”
He took hold of Gilles’ hand again. His eyes suddenly turned cold again.
“When did you get this?”
“Three months ago.”
“Where? How?”
“A bullet in the hand.”
“What happened next?”
“No wound, I wasn’t evacuated. Only sent to the rear.”
“Idiots.”
“What?”
“My boy, if they don’t operate, your arm will be paralysed.”
A quarter of an hour later, Gilles, transfigured, entered the Fouquet. He was going to be hospitalised in Paris at the end of his leave and, in the meantime, he had a hundred francs in his pocket that Vaudemont had offered him, guessing the soldier’s needs. It was also the first time he had been in this place, which seemed to him, like Maxim, to be a paradise where only the finest members of the aristocracy could be found. He ate a huge lunch, drank two cocktails and a bottle of Corton. He looked at everyone with gratitude. Contemplating some magnificent aviators, he regretted not having been able, because of his clumsiness, to enter their weapon, where one could combine risk and luxury.
His gaze turned to a woman. He had not forgotten little Falkenberg; at times he returned tenderly to her breasts, which he had noticed were ravishingly modest. In fact, the more he drank, the more intense was his feeling of the young girl’s existence. Her existence was a point, an exquisite, miraculous point, in which shone a glory of intelligence, tenderness and dignity, but it was a point. Whereas the woman on whom his gaze returned was an increasingly important figure. She displayed that quality in girls that fascinated Gilles: a generosity of flesh that could make him believe in the generosity of life. This was probably why he didn’t notice the middle-class girls, who were generally of a more measured build. Yet he was well aware that this generosity was only an appearance, and that those girls were entirely devoted, like all women, to bourgeois pettiness. This one, like the others, was relatively clean, decent and placid. Whats more, her glances betrayed an almost unbelievable allusion to licence. Rather than follow her, he preferred to return to the brothel. There, a perfect mechanism prevented any confusion. All was order and silence. A bit like Mr Falkenberg’s library.